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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

<<Edit: maybe I should have prefaced my comment with the following: I am going to argue as if you were referring to a self-sustaining colony on Mars because the idea that an Earth-dependent martian city might improve odds of survival does not make much sense at all, imo.>>

Sure, that could happen but expanding to Mars would improve the odds of survival (because an extinction event on both planets simultaneously is less likely than one just on Earth). Earth is currently a so-called "single point of failure" (SPOF)[0] for humanity and all forms of life that we know of.

If we spread humanity and life to Mars and beyond (in an independent/self-sustaining way and not just as an outpost that depends on Earth), neither of the planets alone is SPOF anymore. The solar system is still SPOF but even the close galactic neighbourhood might not be of much help against events that threaten the solar system as a whole (see e.g. about the effects of a gamma-ray burst [1] in our 'proximity'. Note when reading [1] that 1 kiloparsec = 3200 light years! [2]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Effects_on_Ear...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec

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While Earth is technically a SPOF, it is also a very large place with a very long track record for successfully supporting complex life forms. We can even say that life forms as we know them are attractors (local minima) in the chemo-energetical ecological landscape provided by Earth. None of this holds for Mars. Even if we are successful in establishing a handful of outposts, they are likely to be short-lived because the ecological balance works against them.

The thing that leads to No life on Mars more certainly than trying to colonize and terraform it and maybe failing at it is not even trying to do it.

We should practice our terraforming skills on Earth first. When we are able to improve the atmosphere and climate of Earth (easy mode) we can try our skills on a remote and hostile planet like Mars (hard mode).

Conversely, the unpredictable nature of our first big mistake as we transition Terraforming out of science fiction and into text books argues for having a backup planet in place before we try it here.

I'd consider Earth to be hard mode too, since it's already in production and riddled with irrational users who run their entire business on the memory leaks you want to patch. ;-)

Everyone is always seduced by the new — the new idea, the rewrite. But often what one finds is that as development goes deeper, the same bugs resurface, the same challenges. Our society is full of grand, ambitious, “let’s do it right from scratch” plans — Le Corbusier, etc — and they often fail. The blank page is seductive, but it begins the to fall apart with the first mark of the pen.

We can and should do both simultaneously. There are lots of humans.

And humans are quickly and systematically extinguishing nearly all life on this planet, including themselves before too much longer at the rate we are going.

As the legend George Carlin once said, “the planet is fine, the people are fucked”. Although most animals and a bunch of plants are fucked too.

Now that being said, I don’t think that means we should start colonizing Mars or that things would be any better out there.

Consider: The Earth cannot save itself from asteroids without humanity.

And neither it can with humanity. I never heard of plausible plan to do it with technology we have or will have.

We launched DART last week.

That may have changed as of a week ago. NASA is testing a method of deflecting asteroids. See https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/nasa-launch-test-m....

Earth has been hit by asteroids before and survived so far, but sure, it's possible it could be hit by enough, eventually, that it loses its atmosphere, as people think the Earth has already lost 60 percent of its atmosphere from an asteroid strike that they think created the moon[1].

[1]: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/earth-lost-60-per-cent-of-...

I don't think humans will be around long enough to deflect an asteroid that's big enough to do this, as it could easily be hundred or thousands or tens of thousands of years before it might get hit by one big enough to do this again.

When I was young I would assume we would be around that long, but I don't see a path to escaping our own destruction (possibly not total, but 90% or more of the total population, probably) within the next few hundred years at most, possibly sooner.

Of course it can. If it hadn't already done so at least once, we wouldn't even be here.

This is the correct answer. War may spread to mars, but a massive volcanic eruption that blots out the sun (or other non-war mass events) is less of an issue if you live on another planet.

My issue with this is the definition of “you”.

Yes, “humanity” will be in the universe, but they will not be one homogenous culture. What’s the probability that Martian humans will get jealous of Earth’s vast and plentiful resources in 100 - 200 years, and they wage open nuclear and biological war on Earth to wipe out all Earthling humans? Based on what I know about humans, the probability this happens approaches 1 as time moves forward.

And how will they evolve? What will they look like in 1000 years? 1 million? We don’t know of any alien species now, but if we send humans out into the stars we will essentially be creating a new evolutionary branch of spacefaring humanoid aliens. What kind of aliens will they be? The friendly kind that sends scientists to other planets to study their ways? Or will they be warlike aliens from Independence Day, roaming the cosmos like Genghis Khan and consuming all in their path? Again, based on what I know about humanity, we will be both, but the latter could show up one day and just destroy Earth.

Personally I think none of this will happen. We will wipe ourselves off Earth before we can support autonomous space colonies. Likely we will fuck things up here and then our space colonies will shrivel and die from lack of supplies.

> Based on what I know about humans, the probability this happens approaches 1 as time moves forward.

Wouldn’t it be far cheaper for a Mars civilization to exploit the resources of the asteroids rather than bother earth? It’d be enormously uncomfortable for Mars adapted people to spend any time on earth. So if it’s neither economic to exploit earth resources nor would it be possible to enjoy a conquered earth, why ever bother? I guess if it’s possible for a 007 style mad scientist scenario to emerge it approaches 1 given enough time, however it could be so much time that the sun blows up or humanity spreads to other stars.

And that mad scientist could just as easilly be from Earth as from Mars.

Once you have the ability for individuals to launch multi ton payloads on escape velocity, you have the ability for individuals to launch multi ton payloads at earth. While such an individual could target Mars and Earth, the implication of the technology level of a self sustaining mars base is that mankind will be spread throughout the solarsystem (at least the asteroids, venus clouds, mars, moon and earth), and at that stage wiping out the species becomes even harder.

>>>Once you have the ability for individuals to launch multi ton payloads on escape velocity, you have the ability for individuals to launch multi ton payloads at earth.

An important plot point in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress-audiobook/dp/B...

Not forgetting "Mike" :-)

> Wouldn’t it be far cheaper for a Mars civilization to exploit the resources of the asteroids rather than bother earth?

Depends on the resource. If they want milk and chicken for example, it might be better to get that from Earth.

> It’d be enormously uncomfortable for Mars adapted people to spend any time on earth.

They could breed a race of human slaves to work on Earth.

> I guess if it’s possible for a 007 style mad scientist scenario

I’m thinking more along the lines of a Martian Hitler scenario.

> They could breed a race of human slaves to work on Earth.

Wouldn't just buying stuff they need from Earth be much cheaper than exterminating all people on Earth and then repopulated with some new genetically engineered human species?

I didn’t say anything about genetic engineering, they can be regular humans.

Moreover, wars and conquest are not rational endeavors that are undertaken after a careful cost/benefit analysis. WWII wasn’t exactly cost effective for anyone who started that war.

Anyway, the way I see it playing out would be that Earth, realizing they are Mars’ one and only lifeline, will do its best to squeeze Martians for everything they’ve got. It won’t be a mutually beneficial trading relationship between peer nation/planets, but an exploitive one where one party has much more power than the other. Probably a lot like Africa’s place in the world. Unfair and exploitive deals will be cut that reflect the power imbalance, which will brew resentment and envy, and ultimately conflict. This is how you start irrational wars.

What’s the probability that Martian-Terran humans will get frustrated by sending off Earth’s vast and plentiful resources in 100 - 200 years, and they wage open nuclear and biological war on Mars to wipe out all Martian humans?

> If they want milk and chicken for example, it might be better to get that from Earth.

If we have a self-sustaining Mars colony as a given then wouldn’t it be more likely they have at least artificial substitutes for such things? I find it hard to believe we’d have total war erupting over what would essentially be artisanal foods. This is especially true if they’d only get delivery once every 26 months or so, and, if they were advanced enough that the relative position of the planets were no object then they’re even less likely to need anything Earth had or for Earth to have a monopoly on anything worth waging total war over.

> I’m thinking more along the lines of a Martian Hitler scenario.

Hitler got started in his conquests by securing land and resources lost or unavailable to Germany. What would motivate a Hitler in a self-sustaining Mars colony?

> If we have a self-sustaining Mars colony as a given

I don't think I stipulated to that. Sorry if I did, I didn't have that in mind.

> Hitler got started in his conquests by securing land and resources lost or unavailable to Germany. What would motivate a Hitler in a self-sustaining Mars colony?

That particular Hitler did, but others through history came to power through different means and circumstances. All that's required is the right mixture of psychopathy and narcissism, mixed with power and you've got yourself a budding Hitler. I think psychopathic narcissists are very good at finding power, so it's not really a question of "if" but "when" a psychopathic narcissist becomes in charge of Mars colony, and whether or not the guardrails of the society would hold (as they have in some Earthly societies when Hitlers have come to power) or if they would crumble and yield to an authoritarian dictator (as happened in Germany and other places where Hitlers took over).

Yes, going out into the stars sounds great and all, but one of the implications of that is that we spread human pathologies, which includes fascism and Nazism. That's basically the Empire in Star Wars. I just think that we have to be realistic and recognize that could happen sooner rather than later. What if Mars colony goes full fascist and decides they want to ethnically cleanse Earth for no other reason than they believe them to be inferior and impure? It's not like it hasn't happened before.

>Wouldn’t it be far cheaper for a Mars civilization to exploit the resources of the asteroids rather than bother earth

There are lots of available resources on earth in abundance that aren't on asteroids. But yeah, they wouldn't be after metals

The problem with pessimism is that it is usually wrong, always counterproductive, and almost never gets held accountable for either. History is chock full of wrong pessimists. Smarter ones than you or I, even -- but still wrong. Hopefully you will be another.

Imagine an alternate history where Britain never let colonists go to the Americas on the assumption that either Britain would collapse before the colonies became self-sustaining or the colonies would become belligerent and conquer Britain. Now extrapolate out what the actual alternate-history would have likely been, and whether those concerns would have been wise or foolish.

> History is chock full of wrong pessimists

You mean like the ones who were warning about how the world was woefully unprepared for a global pandemic? Or the ones who were warning about climate change?

> The problem with pessimism is that it is usually wrong, always counterproductive, and almost never gets held accountable for either. History is chock full of wrong pessimists.

History is filled with correct pessimists as well. Has anyone ever been wrong by predicting that humans competing for resources on a frontier will come into violent and deadly conflict with one another?

I realize it’s not a particularly deep or insightful thing to say, but there seems but be an unchecked optimism in these threads, one that builds a narrative of humanity spreading to the stars and filling the universe with our light. Meanwhile on Earth Prime we have famine, genocide, war, and an unquenchable need to consume and multiply. If Corona were sapient it would be making the same argument - we must spread to the stars to continue our existence! No one really stops to ask “why?”. Why should we spread to the stars? Why is the continued existence of our species important to the universe? Doesn’t this line of reasoning make humanity no better than a virus?

Imagine humanity coming across a planet filled with sapient alien trees. Completely defenseless and they have no concept of war. What would humans do at first chance? Slaughter them and use them for fuel or building materials. Is spreading the idea and practice of genocide across the universe really what’s best for anyone? What’s the other side of it? Is there an argument for why we should do this thing that isn’t grounded in selfishness?

>Why is the continued existence of our species important to the universe?

It's important to us, which is the only criterion worth a damn when deciding what we should do.

Specifically, the continued existence of at least some members of the human species is probably the only ethical axiom that every single human on Earth can agree on. If you openly disagree - if you embrace the extinction of the human race as a personal goal - well I can only say that we are irredeemably enemies, and I will seek your destruction with proportionate effort to my estimate of your likelihood of succeeding, and I do not think I will be alone.

(This is not to say I do not also consider sapient alien trees worth preserving.)

I get what you're saying but what do you think about Mutual Assured Destruction then? Your reasoning goes against this doctrine. That is the leadership of a nuclear country must not retaliate to preserve humanity.

That's a game-theoretical curiosity rather than an earnest desire to eliminate all of humanity. The point is to make a big show of being willing and able to commit mass murder, while fervently hoping it doesn't actually come to that. MAD is actually a result of people trying to prevent nuclear death - for themselves, at any rate. And I don't think human extinction is an intended outcome even in the very worst case (Dr Strangelove's Doomsday Device being, thankfully, a work of fiction).

But of course you're right - it would be extremely unethical to say the least to actually retaliate in a MAD scenario. This fact is well known and widely discussed.

> but they will not be one homogenous culture

No, as Humanity is not a homogeneous culture here on Earth. We'll diverge as we make colonies a couple light-hours and we'll diverge a lot more when our worlds are separated by light-years and people and goods take centuries to go from one world to another. Hopefully we can invent some form of FTL travel or, at least, communication so we are less disconnected.

OTOH, wars get really complicated when the fleet takes a century to arrive at its destination, carrying 100 year old weapons.

> Based on what I know about humans, the probability this happens approaches 1 as time moves forward.

Yes given infinite time we know humans are extinct. We will not survive the heat death of the universe. But i don't think this truism says much about whether or not creating a self sustaining colony on Mars will increase the longevity of our species.

The chances of some type of existential interplanetary war between Mars and earth is so much lower than than an existential earth war. It's really difficult to wage any type of meaningful war across planets. They're really far apart, and it's really expensive to leave Earth.

Earth post a super volcano would still be far more habitable than mars, same thing goes for a major impact event, nuclear winter and pretty much anything else that doesn’t turn the atmosphere into a firestorm, boils the oceans and turns all land mass into lava…

And if you get to the point in which you can terraform mars then fixing the earth would be again far easier unless all biomass somehow dies and there is no atmosphere left and earth somehow loses its magnetic field.

At best mars might serve as a temporary lifeboat but even then if you have the technology to sustain life on mars you would be better off building protected habitats on earth.

Worrying about gamma ray bursts is silly when we're staring down the barrel of widescale planetary disaster within one or two lifetimes if we don't immediately start doing more about climate change.

If the time it would take for a colony to not just self-sustain but grow is less than the time it will take before Earth's economy and industry become unstable, colonization doesn't help with single point of failure.

Look at what COVID and a handful of bad weather events have done over the years to major economic sectors and industries. The chip shortage is in part due to water shortage in Taiwan. Flooding a while back caused huge hard drive shortages. Etc.

Now imagine instead of the problem being "make enough pickup trucks", it's "put a bunch of electronics and equipment on a rocket and send it to a colony, or people start dying."

Talk of colonization efforts right now is like building a garage for the Ferrari you're going to buy some day. You just have to convince the HOA in your trailer park to accept the plans, and figure out how to use your lawnmower to bring home the lumber from Lowes...

Let's worry about colonization when we've sorted out how to live sustainably on this planet, and feeding/clothing/housing and medically caring for everyone who needs it...

Right? Our worst problems here seem pretty mild compared with the expense of a meaningful human establishment on a far away rock. It would be massively cheaper to build settlements on the most hostile desert on earth.

But more importantly, a Mars colony would require an incredibly stable society on earth. Because it would take decades and massive amounts of money — and that ain’t happening in the midst of societal collapse due to a failure to solve our problems here at home.

I’m a fan of space exploration, and I don’t think we should hit the breaks on it. But I don’t think we should be delusional to think there’s any realistic chance of it solving problems here on earth fast enough. Me must find a way to live sustainably here over the next few centuries.

The problem with, “let’s wait until Earth’s problems are taken care of”, is that Earth’s problems are never going to be truly taken care of. Reduced yes, eliminated no, and there will always be someone arguing that we’re not yet at the threshold at which settling other planets is ok.

This is dangerous because we don’t know how much of a window we have for doing these things. We have the capability to get into space and out of Earth’s gravity well now, but there’s no guarantee that we will continue to. It’s not hard to imagine that as part of efforts to “solve Earth’s problems”, the launch industry becomes restricted to satellite launches only and atrophies to a point where taking a crew beyond Earth’s orbit can’t be done without a decade+ of relearning.

Its better to continually develop these capabilities and make use of them so the field is always moving forward and more entities gain them, making them harder to lose.

We have enough people and resources to do that alongside environmental disaster prevention efforts… it’s just a matter of political will. If you ask me, the biggest problem that is in most dire need of solving at this particular moment is actually obstruction of environmental reform coming from powerful corporate entity superpolluters — chiefly, manufacturers, ocean cargo shippers, airlines, and the the oil industry that feeds all of them.

> Talk of colonization efforts right now is like building a garage for the Ferrari you're going to buy some day.

Someone in a trailer park isn't likely to ever get that Ferrari, so your scenario kinda begs the question that we're never going to be in a position to reach Mars after fixing the earth.

But I think your scenario is flawed anyway. We aren't living in a trailer park, we're in Holland and the dykes are breaking for the last time. Some of us (you, in my analogy) want to try and fix them again. Others (me, etc) want to build boats and send a colony elsewhere.

The plans aren't mutually exclusive. But it's foolish to do only one.

> Earth is currently a… "single point of failure"

The problem with Earth isn't Earth, it's us. Going to Mars isn't going to change everything about humans that has made us hellbent on destroying ourselves. It'll definitely be cool and exciting, and sure, maybe it'll offer some protection against a once-every-billion-years asteroid, but that is not the threat we face today. The threat we face today is ourselves. Going to another planet isn't going to fix that; it's just going to move the problem to a new place. At this stage in our development, thinking that colonizing Mars is going to solve our problems is like someone who has had a string of bad relationships thinking that maybe the next one will magically work out despite having taken absolutely no stock of themselves.

I think your analogy is not valid. Colonizing Mars is like having another home in different country in case that current home is destroyed by fire. It has nothing to do with relationships, apart from being able to have relationships at both places. Sometimes changing your neighbourhood actually helps.

I see what you're saying but I disagree because I think your analogy inverts the risk analysis. In your second home analogy, a house burning down is an asteroid. But the chances of an asteroid hitting Earth in any reasonable timeframe are so minuscule as to be completely negligible. Far more likely is that we destroy our own house through willful negligence. Having a second home doesn't mitigate that risk in the slightest. It just means we burn down two houses instead of one.

I agree with your risk analysis. Destroying civiliasation by ourselves is much more likely, it even happened several times, humanity still survived, but now we have weapons which can fuck up whole planet much more thoroughly.

BUT we can still insure against more than one scenario. Having home on another planet seems easier than changing whole humanity so we should at least try.

How do you think this affect policy? Would we be likely to engage in more dangerous activities simply because we have a backup planet?

E.g: 1. Maybe we would have carried on with more risky nuclear test in the past? 2. Maybe less people would care about global warming on earth?

These questions came to mind while reading your comment. Not sure if they make sense.

No, because continuity of civilization is nowhere in most people's decision making process. Everything they actually care about is on Earth and that doesn't change with a mars base.

> Everything they actually care about is on Earth and that doesn't change with a mars base.

I can see what you're saying for the first generation of people who go from Earth to Mars. I don't see that scenario for the majority of people eventually born there, and subsequent generations. Just like how I know relatively little of my European ancestors who came to the US, and I've never been there, and that's on the same planet with international travel relatively cheap compared to the first ones over. Some people will be born there and never leave or know anything other than Martian life except what they read or view on some video. Some will be able to travel back and forth. I don't think most will.

People on Earth will care about Earth, people on Mars will care about Mars.

Do you give up on US problems just because you have lost relatives in Europe? No. Do your lost relatives in Europe give up on European problems because a lost relative moved to the US? No. Neither of us has ever met them, but I can still confidently say "no" because that's just not how people work. We have plenty of things to worry about, a mars colony altering basic psychology shouldn't be one of them.

Correct, but obviously Martian populations would need to be completely independent of Earthly support.

In order for that to happen, one needs to have Martian populations. Necessity being the mother of invention.

Perhaps too many words can conflate Mars only being a small step toward us "Contact"ing who we are to become: https://youtu.be/sRPUO6gGSh8 ?

Nuclear attacks could target all points of failure though.

Adding redundancy makes our civilization more resilient. Being more resilient is a good thing. The fact that this increased resilience doesn't make our civilization invincible seems like a weird sticking point, since a) that goal is obviously beyond our capability right now, and b) redundancy is a necessary step in that direction.

If we send humans into space they won’t be part of our civilization, they will be their own. They may depend on us at first, but that bond will lessen over time and they will likely eventually demand independence and autonomy from Earth over time. This will be denied to them, and a bloody interplanetary war between Martians and Earthlings will ensue. See: America v. Briton.

Does anyone else get the feeling that HN readership is far too biased from sci-fi?

With that logic, no country would have ever let explorers leave their country to begin with.

The logic of the host country is that they can quash any rebellion through the extreme application of violence against the rebels. It works out sometime for them, and other times it doesn’t.

Either way a lot of people end up dead on both sides. They are the poor, children, colonists, and indigenous peoples. Importantly, they are not members of the aristocracy, so no lessons are ever learned by elites as to why empire building is a bad idea.

With that logic we would all still be living on the same continent and would never have spread across the Earth to begin with.

I mean, I think it’s widely held that humans coming down from trees was a bad idea and should have never happened.

You may notice the people who say that are hypocrites who believe their existence is legitimate and worthy of defending. Hint: they don't actually believe that.

They’re referencing a bit from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

That's happened to me twice in the past week. Time to re-read it.

Trees? Hah! We never should have crawled out of the ocean.

On both planets simultaneously?

Perfect is the enemy of good.

There's a chance the data center where I host my offline backups could be destroyed at the same time as my house. Does this mean I should stop wasting my time and effort on off-site backups?

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